Red Hat Certified System Administrator (EX200) – RHCSA Exam Prep

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The Red Hat Certified Systems Administrator course covers a wide array of content that every administrator should know. Understanding and working with these tools will be vital both for the RHCSA exam and in your career moving forward. This video covers what prerequisites are required.

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In this video you learn about me! My name is Rob Marti. My IT career has run the gamut of call center support, hardware repair, managing servers for a university, and finally - before I came to Linux Academy - working at Open Source giant Red Hat. I've held many certifications over the years including Red Hat's Clustering, Performance Tuning, Satellite, and a few others. I'm excited to help serve the Community here at Linux Academy!

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This lesson covers information about the RHCSA exam. We go over the different objectives on the exam and some information about the exam environment.

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At the recent Red Hat Summit, Red Hat announced RHEL8 and their training plans. In this video we go over how Linux Academy is going to handle this transition.

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Redirecting input, output, and error messages will be a useful skill throughout a system administrators career. Whether it's saving output for analysis later, being able to easily save portions of a log file, or making batch commands simpler, you're going to need to understand how this all works. This video covers that and pipes, which allow for stringing commands together.

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grep is a super powerful tool for finding specific information in the flood of files that system adminstrators often find themselves sifting through. In this course we'll look at some small examples of the things grep can do, and learn about some of the power of regular expressions.

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SSH is one of the most used utlities in a system administrater's arsenal. In this course we cover some of the most used flags, how to use ssh and how to X11 forward.

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As part of normal sysadmin duties you'll need to switch between users for troubleshooting and service design. Understanding how a user's environment interacts with the su command is an important skill. In this video we cover that command and explain a little about environments.

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Archiving and compressing files is a useful skill when it comes to designing backup methods. Here, we'll go over some standard compression/archive tools.

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In this course we'll go over how to create and manage files in Linux, and what a file is exactly. Using different commands to create, edit, and manipulate files is an important skill for a Linux administrator. So is the ability to find files when you're not sure where they are.

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Hard and soft links have some important distinctions from regular files. In this lesson we'll go through some of the differences, and show some of the capabilties.

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Understanding how permissions are set on files helps to understand how and why you or your users might run into problems accessing files or commands. This course will help to understand what the permissions mean and how to set or change them.

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A session's umask is used to determine the default permissions a new file or directory is created with. This lesson goes over what a mask is, how it works, and how to change it.

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Using documentation that already exists on your system can often save some frustration related to innacurate information found by searching the web. Knowing where that information exists on your system is a challenge, however. This course aims to solve that challenge and give you the information needed to succeed.

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Knowing how a server boots and how to interrupt the process for maintenance is an important skill. This video covers that and covers one of the most frustrating things you'll have to do: reset the root password on a server.

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From understanding what processes are running, to setting priorities for running processes, understanding how to manage them is an important skill for any administrator. This video covers how to figure out what's running, how to manage those processes, and what a load average is.

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An important skill is knowing where to look when things are going wrong. In this video, we cover where and how things are logged, and a quick peek into how the systemd journal works.

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Even though a significant portion of companies are moving towards using containers, Virtual Machines still have their place. In this lesson we'll go over how to set up a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server as a Virtual Host, and how to install and manage VMs using both the CLI and the GUI.

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Starting and stopping services is a skill system administrators need to have. This video covers how to do it, and how to get information about services whether they're running or not.

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The easiest way to get files from one place to another is to copy them over the network. This video will walk through doing it in a secure, encrypted manner.

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Working with logical volumes is much easier than partitioning disks, when it comes to adding space to a mount point. There's less down time and less risk involved with using LVM. LVM also makes things easier to manage in general. In this video, we'll go over how to create and manage logical volumes.

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Partition manipluation is important for setting up and expanding servers. You'll need to be able to create, delete, and change the type of partitions. You should also know some of the differences between GPT and MBR partition types.

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Knowing how to look at and use things like UUIDs or filesystem labels is another important skill for Linux system administrators. This video covers that and goes into some detail on how to configure those settings for different filesystems.

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NFS and SMB network file systems are commonly used to share files throughout a datacenter. This lesson will walk through some simple set ups so that you can become familiar with how they work and how to configure them.

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Sometimes the normal octal permissions structure isn't granular enough. When that happens, filesystem ACLs can help. This lesson will help you understand what ACLs are, when to use them, and how to apply them.

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We've got to decide on a network configuration when we're designing and deploying new systems. This video will help to understand how to set a network up for success.

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Having a consistent time available to reference is important for many things, like easier troubleshooting in a multi-system environment. Network Time Protocol (NTP) is how we can be set up for success. This video covers some information about NTP.

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From scheduling one-off jobs to making sure a command runs as often as required, you'll need to know how to schedule jobs. This video goes over the three primary ways to do it.

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Modifying what kernel the system is going to boot into is important for troubleshooting. Knowing how to change the boot target from the running operating system (rather than at the console while booting up) is definitely a useful skill. This video covers that and how to get information about the running kernel.

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What good are servers without software to run? In this video we'll cover how to install software and how to configure yum.

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In this lesson we'll address setting up LDAP authentication. Understanding this will allow you to use a single, central, authoritative source for user information, rather than each server using its own user information.

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Manipulating and maintaining user accounts is necessary for the health of your environment. In this video we learn how to manipulate and create user accounts.

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Managing accounts is an important part of managing security for your server. This video covers managing password aging, both individually and system wide, as new accounts are created.

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Managing group access is almost as important as managing user access. This video goes over how to do it, and some of the things that are possible with primary and supplementary groups.

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Managing the firewall in Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a task that many admins will be called upon to do. This video goes over some of the ways to do so, and an explantion about what firewalld zones are.

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SELinux has a troubled past but isn't as bad as it's been made out to be. In this lesson we'll go over the basics of SELinux and how to troubleshoot potential issues.

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Since each server is running hundreds of processes all the time, how does the kernel figure out what process is more important than other ones? Should that text editor over there get more or equal CPU time to the database that keeps your business running? No, it shouldn't. In this lesson we learn about process priorities and how to change them if needed.

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Normally, journald journals don't persist through reboots. This means that it's more difficult to use the power of the journald metadata to assist in your troubleshooting endeavors. In this lesson we go over how to make these journals persistent and why you'd choose to do so.

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There's no such thing as too much storage in today's datacenters. You could use userland tools like gzip to compress data and save space - but you'll run into issues with ease of access and time spent compressing and extracting the required data. Linux has adopted the Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) layer as a method of essentially trading CPU and RAM resources for disk space. In this lesson we go over what VDO is and how to implement it, in addition to some of the things to keep in mind while evaluating the use of VDO in your infrastructure.

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The AppStream is a new tool added by Red Hat in RHEL8. It allows admins to install different versions of popular software, in addition to different profiles for different packages (for example, a minimal httpd server). Understanding how modules work and how to interact with them will be helpful in both passing the RHCSA and administering RHEL8 servers.

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The Linux kernel keeps track of what processes get CPU time by using a Scheduler. For most use cases, the normal scheduler is fine - but if you want to try and tweak performance a bit more, using Real Time schedulers might get you there. In this lesson we learn a little about the different Real Time schedulers and how to manipulate processes using them.

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Rather than having things mounted all the time, a service like AutoFS can mount network shares only when they're being used, and dismount them when they aren't. This lesson goes over configuring AutoFS.

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One of the benefits of LVM is the fact that you can add space "on the fly" - that is, it is easy to add a new disk and then grow the area you can write data to. VDO also has this capability. In this lesson we go over how to do these tasks.

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The conclusion to our video course. Thanks for sticking with me throughout.